NHL just doesn’t get it with brain injuries

Brent Seabrook #7 of the Chicago Blackhawks hits Raffi Torres #13 of the Vancouver Canucks in the chest with his stick after Torres took him down in the 2nd period in Game Three of the Western Conference Quarterfinals during the 2011 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs at the United Center on April 17, 2011 in Chicago, Illinois.

Photograph by: Jonathan Daniel
, Getty Images

CHICAGO — It was bound to happen in the Stanley Cup playoffs, when desire overcomes common sense and the urgency to win trumps all other considerations.

Someone was going to play with a concussion because, no matter how he really felt, he couldn’t stand not being out there when his teammates needed him.

Someone’s team was going to shrug and say: “What can we do? He said he was fine.”

Someone’s staff was going to look the other way on the NHL’s well-intentioned concussion protocol which, so far, doesn’t seem to have a lot of bite to it if the rules aren’t followed.

Someone turned out to be Brent Seabrook.

Gone now from the lineup with the ubiquitous “upper body” injury, the Chicago Blackhawks’ best defenceman of their soon-to-be-over playoff season quite clearly suffered his concussion when hit behind the net by Vancouver forward Raffi Torres at 12:14 of the second period of Sunday’s Game 3 — a shoulder to the head deemed not a suspendable offence by the league and sufficiently dealt with by a two-minute interference penalty.

Well, everyone’s beaten the incident to death for two solid days — and now it’s been exceeded by two far more egregious head hits by Pittsburgh’s Chris Kunitz and Tampa Bay’s Steve Downie that were lightly punished by the NHL’s feckless discipline department on Tuesday — so that discussion will wait until later.

It’s what happened after Seabrook was hit that ought to be setting off all kinds of alarms in the NHL offices.

The Tsawwassen native, who turns 26 Wednesday, was struck primarily in the head, went down hard, and was back on the ice for his next shift, 26 seconds later, and another one after that, before being directed to retire for the mandatory 15-minute examination in the “quiet room,” per the NHL’s newly adopted protocol.

The exam would have mostly taken place, conveniently, during the period break.

What we now know for sure is that the quiet room doesn’t work.

It might give a doctor a marginally better chance to see whether there’s anyone home when he looks into the patient’s eyes, and asks him a few salient questions, but it isn’t foolproof because no two brains are alike, and no two brain injuries, either.

Seabrook was deemed good to go when he was sent back on the ice to play the entire third period — or seven-plus minutes of it — yet two days later he wasn’t able to function for what, as far as he or his team knew, might have been their last game of the playoffs.

It’s not supposed to happen this way. The protocol is there to protect the brains of players from further scrambling after a suspected concussion, but in this case, it failed to detect the problem. Like the Sidney Crosby concussion, symptoms either didn’t appear, or were not divulged by the victim, until long after the fact.

“Over the course of the last couple of days, we’ve been evaluating (Seabrook),” Hawks coach Joel Quenneville said Tuesday, after the defenceman didn’t take the pre-Game 4 skate. “And this morning, seeing how things presented . . . we were hopeful he was playing, so . . . we made our decision.”

Seabrook had said Monday he felt fine other than being “sore” from the hit, but a day later, Quenneville said “sore can mean a lot of things.”

In some other week, a new and lucrative 10-year deal with NBC/Versus might have allowed the NHL to paint a happy face on its most exciting time of year, but these have been a dreadful couple of days — on the ice, to be sure, but most appallingly, in its backrooms.

A cynic might wonder if the piddling one-game suspensions issued to Kunitz and Downie on Tuesday — or even Monday’s astonishing exoneration of Torres on an obscure technicality — were motivated by the league’s desire to downplay any negative news that might detract from the timing of the TV announcement.

Then there’s the other possibility — that the new TV deal is all the proof the NHL needed to confirm what it already knew: blood sells, explosive hits are good business, and if there’s a collateral damage among the workforce, well, so what?

What’s really saddening, though, is that Downie — who left his feet and launched himself into the head of Pittsburgh’s Ben Lovejoy, driving him into the boards behind the net — received a 20-game suspension four years ago for a nearly identical hit on Dean McAmmond. Now, as a repeat offender, he gets one game.

How can this be?

Kunitz’s elbow to the head of Tampa’s Simon Gagne was, if possible, an even more blatant attempt to injure — no one could possibly describe it otherwise — yet the NHL’s Rule 21 was not invoked. It almost never is. And as keeps happening, night after night, the referees assessed only minor penalties for both incidents — and Downie’s was voided when the Penguins scored on the play.

It’s as though the referees are afraid to do the right thing, on the spot, and would rather leave it to Colin Campbell to clean up the mess. But Campbell keeps fumbling the job in ways that would be funny if they didn’t have such potentially dire consequences.

And this is the league that is leading the way on brain injuries. The get-tough-on-head-hits league. The league that took one step forward with its lengthy suspension of Pittsburgh’s serial headhunter Matt Cooke but has taken a dozen steps back ever since.

Brent Seabrook #7 of the Chicago Blackhawks hits Raffi Torres #13 of the Vancouver Canucks in the chest with his stick after Torres took him down in the 2nd period in Game Three of the Western Conference Quarterfinals during the 2011 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs at the United Center on April 17, 2011 in Chicago, Illinois.

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